Advances in Internet technology such as blogging platforms and website creation tools makes it easy and inexpensive for people to build blogs and websites. Such ease of use and cost effectiveness has enabled many individuals without computer programming background to use the Internet as a medium to present their “creations” to the rest of the world. These creations may include inter alia digital media such as photos, videos, graphics, illustrations, animations, and music, as well as physical items such as paintings, crafts, mechanical devices, sculptures, and hand-made greeting cards.
In some cases individuals or organizations wish to sell their creations over the Internet, i.e. perform e-commerce. Typically, individuals, henceforth referred to as sellers, use an existing, centralized, e-commerce website to list and sell their creations to avoid the cost and complexity of attempting to add e-commerce capability to their own personal blog or website. Examples of existing, centralized, e-commerce websites that enable a seller to sell their creations, commonly referred to as marketplaces, include Amazon Marketplace and eBay. Amazon Marketplace is provided by Amazon Inc. of Seattle, Wash. eBay is provided by eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif. Marketplace websites enable a seller to list items for sale and to provide descriptive information including text, photos, and videos on a web page provided by the e-commerce provider. Marketplaces also provide shopping carts, accept online payments, make payments to the seller after deducting any sales commissions, and provide the seller with sales reports. A marketplace, in effect, creates and manages a store for the seller. While marketplaces often attract large numbers of buyers, the seller is not able to offer their creations in the context of a highly personalized, boutique-style website. Thus there is a need to sell creations easily and efficiently from a seller's personal website, thus forming a distributed or decentralized e-commerce marketplace.
One prior art approach to enabling websites and blogs to add e-commerce capability is shopping cart plug-ins that can be easily added to web pages. A disadvantage with this approach is that shopping cart plug-ins require the seller to add items to a catalog before they can be offered for sale. In effect, the seller must create a product catalog and establish pricing before offering items for sale from their website. However, this can be cumbersome, especially for photographers and other creators of digital media items who may add many media items to their website at a time. Therefore, it would be advantageous to be able to enable items to be sold immediately after they are added to a website without having to first add them to a catalog.
In cases the items being sold are based on some type of digital content, henceforth referred to as digital media items. For example, the items being sold may be prints of a seller's digital photos; or an item of merchandise with a seller's digital photo printed on it such as a greeting card, or a CDs or DVDs that includes a seller's digital content. In such cases, it may be convenient for the seller to manage related digital media items as a group or collection. For example, rather than assigning a price to print, or card, individually it may be more convenient to assign a single price to a collection. Thus, there is a need to enable a seller to conveniently assign individual media items to collections and to enable a seller to define rules for the automated processing of collections.